The Brothers' Lot - Kevin Holohan [39]
From the third year class where he was teaching, Laverty caught sight of Brother Loughlin’s smug, self-satisfied face just before it disappeared back into the toilet in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He turned to see the stony faces of the class he now had to try to teach.
Before he knew it, he had opened his mouth and blurted out: “The bastard never asked me! This wasn’t my idea!” The boys stared back at him in stunned admiration.
Brother Boland was in the refectory polishing his handbell when he felt it. It was like a sudden increase in atmospheric pressure. He fearfully laid the bell back on the table and set his polishing cloth over it. He closed his eyes and tuned his other senses to the frequency of the building. “It’s getting worse!” he blurted out.
“What are you doing? Frightened the life out of me!” exclaimed Brother Cox as he spluttered tea all over himself.
“Have you lost your mind, Brother Boland?” asked Brother Walsh.
Brother Boland moved around the room feeling the walls and testing the windows as he spoke: “It’s there! More present. It’s tightening!”
“Will you calm down or I’ll have to get Brother Loughlin. This is no way to behave,” cautioned Brother Walsh.
“You’d want to watch these outbursts, Brother Boland. You know Brother Loughlin already thinks you might be a candidate for the attic,” added Brother Cox.
Brother Boland stood rigidly and stared from Cox to Walsh. “Useless! Nothing but abuse!” he snapped, before rushing out and slamming the door behind him.
“Awake! Awake! Alarum! Éistigí! Éistigí! Alea iacta est! The time is upon us! There is a hosting!”
Brother Boland darted like some frantic butterfly along the top corridor of the monastery. This was where the moribund retired Brothers lived. It was a fearful place and Brother Boland could not even remember who lived up here. The elder Brothers were mostly bedridden or mad, and were not allowed to come to the refectory or to attend mass. They received communion every morning from Father Flynn who came after he celebrated mass for the other Brothers in the oratory. He and Widower Frawley, who brought them their food and changed their chamber pots, were the only ones who ever had regular contact with them.
The air of the place terrified Brother Boland. It smelt of slow death. It was where they put the Brothers who were too far gone to do odd jobs like he did but were not yet dead enough to bury. Brother Boland dreaded ever coming up here, yet the insolent indifference of the younger Brothers had left him no alternative than to stir the ancients.
“Alarum! Alarum!” he shouted as he skittered along the corridor pounding on the cell doors. He reached the dead end of the corridor and leaned exhaustedly against the wall to catch his breath.
From behind the doors arose a doleful moaning.
“Right then, sit down all of you. I hope you have learnt something from that,” barked Brother Kennedy, and started to take his Latin books out of his satchel.
He glanced down at the roll book. “Mr. Egan, you will clean the blackboard.”
“He’s outside talking to Mr. Murphy.”
“He is, is he? Mr. Whitehall then.”
Whitehall, who had based his whole school career thus far on never being noticed, went bright red and then green in the face. He walked wraithlike to the top of the class and clumsily cleaned the board.
“Take out your lines!”
Brother Kennedy started to work his way round the class inspecting the lines of Caesar’s Gallic Wars he had set them. He cast his expert eye over each copybook, quickly counting the repetitions, looking for indications of pens being tied together, variances in handwriting that might indicate someone else’s work, failure to follow the prescribed color scheme for alternate words, or any other infraction